Council pioneers the citizen's smartcard

A Thames Valley council has become the first in the UK to offer shopping and services using a multi-function smartcard.

Youth club membership, library facilities, car park payments, and school meals and attendance records will be among the applications available.

Bracknell Forest Borough Council this week signed a £3.3 million five-year deal with BT Ignite Solutions to work on the project. Local authorities have to meet the government's target of putting all services online by 2005.

The council will also offer a service called Epurse, which allows residents to carry small amounts of money on the card, managed in a similar way to mobile phone top-up cards.

The smartcards will have a PIN number to prevent unauthorised use.

Bracknell Forest has already successfully completed a loyalty card trial with 16,000 users, and hopes to make the other applications available to all its 110,000 residents at the beginning of next year, after further testing.

The smartcard works via an embedded chip which is scanned by a reader containing a virtual database of information. This is linked to a back-end server, which is remotely managed by BT Ignite.

The council is developing a card application management service, to record information not restricted by the Data Protection Act.

It may embed the chip into other devices, such as mobile phones, to allow citizens to access council services whatever their location.

"Bracknell is known for being at the heart of the UK's own Silicon Valley. We want to create an infrastructure that's a combination of technology and community, on which we can build and develop other applications," said the council's chief executive, Gordon Mitchell.